D.C.-area food critics have often lamented the dearth of German restaurants, and normally, we, too, would join in with complaints, as we are fond of the hearty meat-and-potatoes peasant food and earthy beers the Germans do so well. But since dining recently at Capitol Hill’s Café Berlin, we will forever bite our tongues; our meal here took us right back to the beer halls we have visited abroad.

The menu offered all of the requisite German staples: sauerbraten, goulash, wiener schnitzel, Jaeger schnitzel, and, of course, a wurst platter. We took on the sauerbraten and the goulash as the dishes that would best satisfy our meat and starch cravings.

The meat used for sauerbraten was a bit tough, which made the substantial potato dumpling accompanying it a necessarily pliant foil. Too often, the sauce used in sauerbraten tends to err on the sweet side, but Café Berlin’s version had just the right amount of sweetness without being too cloying. And the potato dumpling served as an excellent vehicle for sopping up leftover sauce. Of course, when the supply of dumpling was exhausted, the crusty loaf of bread served our needs just fine.

We started out with an order of potato pancakes, which arrived in a manageable medium size and virtually grease-free. A very crispy outside, slightly charred in some places, yielded a creamy cooked-through inside. We piled generous amounts of applesauce and sour cream and triumphantly declared them the best in the universe.